


Bruh

by dangercupcake



Category: Superstition by Superstition_hockey
Genre: Eating Disorders, Gen, Hockey, M/M, Non-binary character, Self-Discovery, married conversations, orthorexia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-19
Updated: 2017-05-19
Packaged: 2018-11-02 15:56:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10947816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dangercupcake/pseuds/dangercupcake
Summary: He’s got Don Cherry saying, “We’re finally seeing the return of a real man’s hockey game from Luc Chantal this year.” Blech.





	Bruh

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Breakaway](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8917384) by [Superstition_hockey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Superstition_hockey/pseuds/Superstition_hockey). 



Jacks looks down at the leftover salmon. Luc left over half his portion, plus all the quinoa pilaf.

He goes back out to the living room, where Luc is _still_ watching hockey highlights. “Chants,” he says very patiently. “Did you redo your macros?”

Luc flicks his fingers. “Just a little.”

“We had a game this afternoon. If your macros needed to be redone, Thierry would have --”

“Don’t get on me, bro,” snaps Luc, rewinding the highlights to the hit on Marner. Jacks sighs a very deep sigh from the bottom of his soul and leaves the plate in the kitchen. Maybe Luc will eat more later.

*

He does not. He does drink a kale-and-cauliflower protein smoothie. It tastes like ass. Jacks makes it for him with whey and hemp protein powders, and almond milk, and adds half a scoop of green tea extract for the antioxidants. He doesn’t think about the caffeine, which is stupid of him, because then Luc is bouncing off the walls and ends up going running. Ruin all Jacks’ hard work and also his fucking knee. Fine.

*

While he’s out, Jacks watches the highlights he has taped. He’s got Don Cherry saying, “We’re finally seeing the return of a real man’s hockey game from Luc Chantal this year.” Blech. And then a roundtable discussion of Luc’s hit on Marner from the game earlier -- Luc clearly trying to go for a clean hit and Marner turning at the last minute so Luc clips his chin with a shoulder. Marner’s head snaps back and he falls, and then Luc trips over him. It’s a fucking mess, a pile-on. Luc got five minutes for it, and since it was toward the end of the period, he stomped down the hallway anyway; Marns went down the tunnel, too, for concussion protocol, which Jacks thought was probably over-protective, like the concussion version of diving, and he was back the next period, taking hits on bigger guys like one of those tiny dogs that doesn’t know it’s tiny.

Okay, so it sucks, but Jacks doesn’t get why it’s bugging Luc that much. It’s normal stupid Don Cherry stuff, and Luc knows better than to watch his own highlights. 

Jacks does watch his own highlight play in the third period -- they were down three, so it wasn’t going to make the biggest difference, but they did great, a beautiful Chantal goal right in there off Jacks’ play and assist to bring them up to 4-2 to end the game. 

Fucking Leafs. It always hurts to lose at home.

*

Jacks feels like he is force-feeding Luc when he sits him down to eat the rest of his salmon, plus another piece, plus an entire serving (hockey player-sized) of quinoa-and-rice pilaf. He takes away Luc’s phone, and locks Mako outside in the garden with Buddy and Yasha, who are finally home from after-game drinking, but smartly staying away from Luc and Jacks.

Luc stabs at his food like he’s fighting a losing war, and his snide, “Happy now?” to Jacks once he’s cleaned his plate lacks any kind of real power. 

At least he doesn’t throw it all up after, Jacks tells himself. That means he had room for it in his body, and his body wanted it, even though his mind didn’t. 

“Why don’t you go to bed?” suggests Jacks, handing him back his phone.

“Why don’t _you_ go to bed?” Luc pockets the phone without even looking at it.

“Yeah, in a few minutes. I’m gonna let Buddy and Yasha know it’s safe to come in first.”

Luc scowls at him. “I want my dog back.”

“She’ll come in with them.” Jacks tries to stay totally placid and not let Luc get him riled up. 

“ _Fine._ ” Luc bares his teeth at Jacks and heads for the stairs, the phone pulling his too-loose sweatpants down dangerously low at the hips. 

Jacks watches him go until he’s all the way through the living room. 

Luc is always beautiful, but there’s nothing beautiful about what he looks like when he’s running too close to the bone and not eating enough to power that body. What he looks like when he’s literally running away all his calories and insisting he’s fine even when they both know -- and the trainers know -- he’s dropping muscle mass. 

Jacks isn’t going to let it happen this time if he can help it. And maybe he won’t be able to help it, but maybe having him here to lean on _will_ help. It has in the past.

*

Buddy and Yasha are curled up together on the dying grass, under a blanket, with the chickens ( _chickens_ ; Jacks _cannot_ ) climbing over them. 

“C’mon,” Jacks says. “Sleep off the drunk inside, kids.”

Then, somehow, it’s up to him to put the chickens in their coop, and clean up where Mako got into the mud, and turn off all the outside lights, and clean up from dinner.

He takes a snap of the clean dishes in the rack and writes over it MAN OF THE HOUSE and posts it to Insta. Crash gets the first like and Dre gets the second; Jacks feels like all is right with the world. Except all is _not_ right with the world, because Luc is upstairs feeling shitty about something he hasn’t talked to Jacks about yet.

Sometimes Jacks feels like they talked more about the important shit when they were Skyping every night and barely saw each other.

He lets Mako go ahead of him up the stairs to Luc, and he turns out lights as he goes. The bedroom light is already out, but there’s no way Luc is asleep. Not without the dog.

“Hey, Chants,” says Jacks as he opens the door and lets Mako in. She goes right to Luc to lick his face, and then to her bed in the corner.

Luc just grunts. He’s got a pile of blankets on, so something is definitely wrong -- Luc likes the house to be California temperature, so he can walk around in as little clothing as possible, and sleep naked with just a sheet. The house is summer-hot, even though it’s November-cold outside; Luc must be sweating under the quilts from the closet.

Jacks strips down and climbs under there with him, curling around him, arm across his chest.

“Hey, bro,” he says softly to Luc. “Mon chum, mon ami, mon beau mari.”

Luc huffs out a weak laugh.

“Gonna tell me what’s wrong?” Jacks squeezes him.

“You watch the highlights?”

“Dumb as usual.” Jacks shrugs. “I dunno what upset you, Chants.”

“Called me a real man for hitting Marns. A real man.”

Jacks smooths a hand over Luc’s soft hair. “Okay.”

“I am _not that_ , Jacks. That hockey man they’re talking about. I’ll fucking hit a guy, j’m’en câlisse , but not -- the way Don Cherry would hit a guy.”

“I know, Chants. Everyone knows except Don Cherry. He’s an idiot.”

“What the fuck is a _real man_ , I don’t think I’m a real man, Jacks.”

“Of course you --”

“No, I mean, I don’t want -- I’m --” Luc sighs. “I -- I don’t -- I’m a _bro_. I like being a _bro_ , that’s me, bruh, hein? But a _man?_ Like those other _men_ , like the ones -- like --”

“Like Lemieux?” says Jacks softly.

“Pantoute. Là là, tabarnak.”

“Okay.” Jacks runs his fingers through Luc’s hair and holds him close. “It’s okay. We don’t have to talk about it.”

“It’s eating my stomach.” Luc flips over to put his head in Jacks’ neck. “I feel awful,” he mumbles.

Jacks scratches his fingernails up and down Luc’s sweaty back for a while. Once a lot of the tension has gone out of Luc’s muscles, Jacks sniffs, clears his throat.

“You don’t have to be a man,” he says. 

“Euh.”

“You don’t have to _identify_ that way. You can say, I’m a bro. I’m not a _man_. You get to pick what you are, Luc. If someone -- if Bianchi came to you and said, I’m not a man, don’t call me a man anymore, would you tell him to fuck off, or would you respect that?”

“I’d . . . respect it, but it’s fucking weird.”

“Are transgender people weird?”

“What? No, obviously not, don’t be stupid, Oli.”

“Okay, so, relax, this is like that a little bit.”

“I’m not _transgender._ ” Luc knocks his head into Jacks’ collarbone. 

“There’s a lot of stuff inside, like, acronyms and shit,” says Jacks. He’s getting to the end of what he learned on Tumblr when he was, like, sixteen, fuck. “I’m just saying, like, ifyou’re a bro, you’re a bro, you don’t have to be a man. You get to choose what you are. But also, like, you can be a man and not be like Lemieux or Domi or them guys. You can be your own kind of man.”

Luc shakes his head. “I don’t want to -- I’m not _a man_ , the whole word is wrong for me, Oli, don’t you _feel that?_ ”

“No, but . . . I’m a man.” Jacks kisses Luc’s head. “Like, a hundred percent, I’m a man. So I don’t get it. I don’t have to get it.”

“J'cogne des clous,” mumbles Luc, and Jacks thinks that’s probably just his way of getting out of talking about this anymore. “Sleep with me.”

“I’m here,” Jacks tells him, and stays under the covers with him.

**Author's Note:**

> [a little bit of meta from the author in the comments](http://archiveofourown.org/comments/107994474).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Lucky Luc](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14627640) by [TuppingLiberty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TuppingLiberty/pseuds/TuppingLiberty)




End file.
